The Left has traditionally assumed that human nature is so malleable, so perfectible, that it can be shaped in almost any direction. By contrast, a Darwinian science of human nature supports traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.

Friday, February 05, 2010

Goldstein's Appendix: The Arguments for the Existence of God

Rebecca Goldstein's Appendix on the "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" is stunning in its concision, clarity, and cogency. In 53 pages, she lays out the logic of each argument as a series of premises leading to the conclusion "God exists," and then she points out the flaws in each argument that refute it.

Not only does she take up the classic philosophical arguments, she also puts into logical form the emotionally compelling longings that underlie the religious experience of most human beings. So, for example, she includes not only the "cosmological argument," but also "the argument from the intolerability of insignificance."

Here are the 36 arguments:

1. The Cosmological Argument2. The Ontological Argument3. The Argument from Design A. The Classical Teleological Argument B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations D. The Argument from the Original Replicator4. The Argument from the Big Bang5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences9. The Argument from Answered Prayers10. The Argument from a Wonderful Life11. The Argument from Miracles12. The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness13. The Argument from the Improbable Self14. The Argument from Survival After Death15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation16. The Argument from Moral Truth17. The Argument from Altruism18. The Argument from Free Will19. The Argument from Personal Purpose20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics23. The Argument from Holy Books24. The Argument from Perfect Justice25. The Argument from Suffering26. The Argument from the Survival of the Jews27. The Argument from the Upward Curve of History28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius29. The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality31. The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal's Wager)32. The Argument from Pragmatism (William James's Leap of Faith)33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason34. The Argument from Sublimity35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza's God)36. The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments

If you read her Appendix, you will notice how often her refutations depend on citing three kinds of fallacies--The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance, The Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another, and The Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.

Many of the arguments for the existence of God depend on the assumption that if science has not yet provided a full explanation for something, that shows that this must be something that has been created by God. This is the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance. Scientific knowledge is always going to be incomplete. And there probably are some fundamental problems that will never be fully explained by science because of the limitations of human experience and human reasoning. But the mere fact of human ignorance does not dictate the conclusion there there is no natural explanation at all, and that this must be the work of God acting outside of nature. As Goldstein indicates, this is the most common fallacy in the arguments of the "intelligent design theorists": if molecular biologists have not yet explained the step-by-step evolutionary history of bacterial flagella (or any other living phenomenon), that is assumed by the IDers to prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer.

There really are some fundamental mysteries in the universe. But to invoke God as the explanation shows the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another. Goldstein identifies at least six great mysteries:

The first great mystery is evoked by the question, Why is there something rather than nothing? There is no good scientific or philosophic answer for that question, which points to the problem of ultimate explanation. We can keep passing the buck, but the buck must stop somewhere. To say that God is the First Cause--the Uncaused Cause of everything--doesn't resolve the mystery because then we have the mystery of how to explain God. If we can say that God is uncaused or self-caused, then why not say that the Universe is uncaused or self-caused?

Similarly, human consciousness or the uniqueness of human personal identity might forever remain deep conundrums without full scientific explanations. But to say that God created human consciousness and unique human persons only replaces one kind of mystery with another.

Perhaps the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians like Peter Lawler who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.

But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.

And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.

7 comments:

I do not think her take on the Cosmological argument will impress any Thomists, since, as Feser and others point out, if you translate it into modern philosophical terms, you turn the argument into a caricature of itself.

Can't the longing to believe that one's life is important and consequential lead to something that isn't fallacious? Say, something like an aesthete's belief in the power of beauty to move the human spirit, or maybe the type of erotic love of truth that Plato and Nietzsche talk about? I had been looking forward to reading this book, but if its conclusion is that all search for meaning ends either in human frustration or a dishonest answer, than I might not pick it up, unless it also takes issue with the non-religious ways in which human beings find meaning.

If you do read the book, I'll be interested in your interpretation of where she finally ends up on this question.

Through her character Cass Seltzer, she makes the argument that we can find meaning in our human moral, intellectual, and aesthetic activities, even without religious belief in some transcendent cosmic meaning. Cass himself is moved by romantic love, although he is disappointed in that love.

At times, Cass seems to say that whatever we do to find meaning in our lives is either openly religious or a disguised version of religious longing. If this is Goldstein's position, I disagree, for the same reasons that I disagree with Nietzsche's atheistic religiosity.

Maverick Philosopher has what he calls an onto-cosmological argument, which does not invoke the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Since it's one of the better arguments I've read, I think it's worth including.

It isn't based on any of the six great mysteries listed. Simply:

(1) It is possible that facts exist. (2) If it is possible that facts exist, then God exists.(3) Therefore, God exists.